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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012
PAGE 3
NEWS OF THE WORLD
- Associated Press
MIDDLE EAST
ASSOCIATED PRESS
An Afghan police officer inspects a vehicle that was damaged at the scene of a suicide attack on Monday, Feb. 27. The suicide attack killed nine people.
Car bomber kills nine at NATO base
The bombing in the city of Jalailab follows six days of deadly protests in the country over the disposal of Qurans and other Islamic texts in a burn pit last week at a U.S. military base north of Kabul.
American officials have called the disposal of the books a mistake and have issued a series of apologies.
KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide car bomber rammed his vehicle into the gates of a NATO base and airport in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, triggering a blast that killed nine Afghanis, officials said. The Taliban claimed the attack was revenge for U.S. troops burning copies of the Quran.
Runoff required in Sengalese election
AFRICA
The normally loquacious leader didn't take questions and appeared subdued as he met reporters for the first time since Sunday's contentious election, which was preceded by weeks of protests calling for the leader's departure.
DAKAR, Senegal — After days of predicting that he would win a third term with a crushing majority, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade on Monday acknowledged that he had not gotten enough votes to avoid a runoff.
Wade said that with more than half of the vote counted, he was leading 13 other candidates with 32.17 percent.
Experts say that for the 85-year-old to remain in power he needed
to win on the first round when the opposition was split between multiple candidates. In a runoff, his chances of winning are slimmer because the opposition will be united behind a single contender.
This nation of more than 12 million on Africa's western coast is considered one of the oldest and most robust democracies on the continent, but for weeks daily life has been upended by protests calling for Wade to resign.
Analysts have warned of further unrest if Wade were to win the election, and the specter of more violence has eroded the image of a nation that has been held up as a model of stability.
EUROPE
Journalists in Syria may be evacuated
WARSAW, Poland — Poland's diplomats are working to get wounded Western journalists evacuated from the Syrian city of Homs and the bodies of a U.S. journalist and a French photographer out of the country, the Foreign Ministry said Monday.
Also Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he believes the two killed journalists were "assassinated" and that Syria's President Bashar Assad "must go."
Earlier this month, Poland's Embassy in Damascus took charge of representing U.S. interests in Syria, after Washington closed its mission there as a sanction against the escalating violence.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Marcin Bosacki told The Associated Press that Poland's Embassy is cooperating with
U. S., British and French diplomats and with Syrian authorities in efforts "to obtain the evacuation of Western journalists from Homs" and to bring out the bodies of American Marie Colvin and Frenchman Remi Ochlik. Bosacki said the situation was "complicated" and declined to give more details.
Colvin, 56, a veteran correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, and Ochilk, 28, a photojournalist, died Wednesday in a rocket attack on the besieged city of Homs.
Two other journalists, French Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro and British photographer Paul Conroy of the Sunday Times, were wounded in the attack. They have both asked for help leaving the embattled city, which has emerged as the heart of the revolt against Assad's rule.
EUROPE
Forces stop Putin assassination plot
MOSCOW — Security forces have foiled a Chechen-linked plot to assassinate Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, state television reported Monday in a broadcast likely to boost support for Putin's bid to regain the presidency.
Other candidates immediately questioned the timing of the report, which comes just days before Sunday's presidential
election and as Putin and his United Russia party face unprecedented protests following a scandal-marred parliamentary election in December.
Putin
The Communist Party candidate called the assassination report a "cheap trick."
The report, which included two televised confessions, said suspects in the assassination plot have been arrested in Ukraine and were linked to a Chechen rebel leader who has claimed responsibility for other terror attacks in Russia.
Putin, who was Russia's president from 2000 to 2008 and has been prime minister since then, is running for a third, now six-year presidential term. He is expected to win easily against four Kremlin-approved challengers, but a wave of protests since December's tainted parliamentary election has undermined his image as a strong, popular leader.
NATIONAL
Woman crushed to death by unsafe elevator
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK - An important elevator safety mechanism was turned off when an advertising executive was crushed to death trying to take the lift to her office, city investigators found in a report released Monday.
A mechanic overrode the mechanism, a safety circuit that normally prevents elevators from moving with their doors open, to enable work on the midtown Manhattan elevator about a half-hour before an elevator did just that and killed Suzanne Hart on Dec. 14, the city Department of Investigation and Department of Buildings found.
The mechanic insisted hed put the safety system back online by the time Hart tried to step into the car, but investigators concluded the mechanism "was apparently bypassed at the time of the fatal incident, thereby allowing the car to move with its doors open," the investigation agency said.
The Buildings Department, meanwhile, suspended the elevator repair company owner's license. He failed to notify the agency and get an OK to put the car back in service after the repairs that day, among other missteps, officials said.
"The investigation starkly showed elevator safety protocols were ignored," Department of Investigation Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn said in a statement.
The elevator repair company, Transl Elevator Inc., called the accident a tragedy and said it would fight the investigation's findings and the move to strip co-owner John Fichera's license. Isabelle A. Kirshner, a lawyer for mechanic Michael Hill, said she was reviewing the reports but noted he had been "completely cooperative" with the investigation.
The Manhattan district attorney's office was reviewing the report, the product of an investigation that entailed interviewing
several workers, reviewing video footage and even recreating an incident that crystallized the fears of many who rely on elevators in a city of skyscrapers.
Hart, 41, was heading to her office at the advertising agency Y&R, formerly known as Young & Rubicam, when she tried to get into one of several elevators in the lobby of 285 Madison Ave., a 27-story tower built in 1926. Two other people were already in the elevator.
As they looked on in horror, it started rising with the doors still open, dragging Hart between the car and the wall. It got stuck between the first and second floors.
"These workers and their supervisors failed to follow the most basic safety procedures, and their carelessness cost a woman her life," Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri said in a statement. Besides putting the elevator back into service without proper clearance, workers didn't
follow simple precautions such as strapping caution tape across the elevator door, the agency said.
"If these safety measures were in place, this tragedy would have been prevented," Li Mandri added. His agency already has cited Transel with 23 violations carrying a minimum penalty of $117,000.
Investigators considered a range of possibilities, including faulty wiring, a power surge and a programming or brake failure. But they ultimately concluded that the only way the elevator could have started moving under the circumstances was with the safety circuit bypassed.
Mechanic Michael Hill initially told investigators he had no idea why the elevator might have moved with the doors open. Weeks later, he told them under oath that he had temporarily hooked up a wire on the elevator control panel to bypass the safety circuit earlier that morning, the report said.
NATIONAL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Molly Wei testifies during the trial of Dharun Ravi at the Middlesex County Courthouse on Monday, Feb. 27, in New Brunswick, N.J. Ravi is accused of using a webcam to spy on his roommate, Tyler Clementi, having an intimate encounter with another man. Days later, Clementi committed suicide. Ravi, 20, faces 15 criminal charges, including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation, a hate crime punishable by up to 10 years in state prison.
Witness testifies in Rutgers suicide case
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — A key prosecution witness in the trial of a former Rutgers University student accused of watching his roommate's intimate encounter via webcam testified Monday that she agreed to keep it a secret because it was so shocking to see the images — but that wasn't under wraps for long.
"First of all, it was shocking. It felt wrong. We didn't expect to see that. And now that what we did, it was like we shouldn't have seen it," Molly Wei told jurors. "We didn't want people to know what had happened."
But within minutes, she testified,
she and defendant Dharun Ravi
were online chatting with friends
about seeing two men kissing.
And within the hour, Wei said, she
agreed to show a few seconds of the
video stream to four other women
who visited her dorm room.
Ravi's roommate, 18-year-old Tyler Clementi, jumped to his death from New York's George Washington Bridge in September 2010, days after the spying and the gossip about it online and in their dorm.
Still, she said, Ravi did not intend to humiliate his roommate.
Ravi, who turns 20 on Tuesday, faces 15 criminal counts, including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation. To convict him of bias intimidation, the most serious charge he faces, prosecutors would have to persuade jurors that Ravi acted out of bias toward gays.
Wei, 19, was charged initially but entered a program that will allow her to keep her record clean if she meets a list of conditions, including doing community service, working or attending school full-time. She also agreed to cooperate with authorities and testify truthfully in Ravi's trial.
She said she has completed about 250 of the 300 hours of community service required.
There is one requirement that was changed for her. She was to go through a program on cyberbullying or dealing with people with "alternative lifestyles". Since no program like that was offered in Middlesex County, she instead saw a psychologist.
Unlike other more casually
dressed college students who have testified so far in the trial, Wei wore a black business suit. And unlike the others, she kept her voice audible even during the most uncomfortable moments.
She said that she invited Ravi, whom she had known since middle school, to her dorm room for a snack a few minutes after 9 p.m. on Sept. 19, 2010. When Ravi tried to go back, she said, Clementi told him that he wanted the cramped dorm room to himself for a few hours. So Ravi returned.
Within a few minutes, she said, he used her computer to view live images from his webcam. It was then, she said, that she saw about two seconds of Clementi and an older man kissing.
Even though she said they initially agreed not to talk about what they had seen, she asked Ravi to tell a friend about it during an online chat that began at 9:20 p.m. And within minutes, word got around the dorm.
She said she agreed to turn the webcam back on at the request of a woman who was among a group that dropped by her room.
"It was the exact same image, except that they had taken their tops off," she said. "As soon as they saw it, I turned it off."
Ravi's defense lawyer, Steven Altman, asked a series of questions about Ravi's intentions.
— "Dharun never told you he wants you to go around telling everybody about what you saw on those two seconds Sunday night?"
— “Dharun never told you he wanted to make Tyler uncomfortable?”
— “Dharun never told you he wanted to intimidate Tvler?”
To each, she answered, "No."
Wei was expected to be back on the witness stand for more cross-examination on Tuesday.
Also Monday, jurors heard from university official William O'Brien that Clementi requested a room change about 30 hours after the alleged spying — and a day before he killed himself.
O'Brien, associate director of residence life at Rutgers, told jurors that his staff did not see Clementi's request for a new roommate until after he was reported missing from campus.